The ease of generating ebooks and selling them on Amazon has led to easy scam opportunities, like selling books made entirely of Wikipedia articles, forum posts, or other user-generated content. Artists Luc Gross and Bernhard Bauch decided to take this to its logical conclusion with a series of books generated randomly from YouTube comments. The result is masterpieces like Alot was been hard by Janetlw Bauie or Wierd song you cute by Timsest Pitigam, which boast such sentences as “If u dont copy and paste this to 10 vids in 48 hrs the face will come to ur house and kill you.” Technology Review discusses the books and interviews the creators, who say it’s meant to “parasitically exploit” both YouTube and Amazon, which use the freely created content of their customers to make money; the finished project will be shown in Vienna later this month. Visiting the links to the books, however, gets you only an empty page, making us think Amazon might not be so happy with this “auto-cannibalistic” business model.
‘Alot was been hard’: generating Amazon ebooks out of YouTube comments
An art project assembles ebooks entirely out of YouTube comments and sells them on Amazon.
An art project assembles ebooks entirely out of YouTube comments and sells them on Amazon.
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
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